City Lodge completes Courtyard Gqeberha refurbishment in bet on Eastern Cape tourism
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City Lodge Hotels has finished a major refurbishment of the 91-room Courtyard Hotel in Summerstrand, Gqeberha, creating seven permanent jobs as the group extends investment to its Road Lodge and Town Lodge properties in the city.
City Lodge Hotels has completed a major refurbishment of the four-star Courtyard Hotel in Summerstrand, part of a wider investment in its Gqeberha portfolio as the group bets on the Eastern Cape metro's tourism potential. The seafront property, which opened in 2000, has been given a redesign of its 91 rooms, restaurant, conferencing facilities, lobby and public areas. Work began in July 2025 and was completed in April 2026.
Courtyard general manager Erich Oberhauser said the refurbishment had resulted in about seven new permanent positions. While he acknowledged the number is small relative to the scale of unemployment in the metro, he said the investment reflected the company's confidence in the local tourism and hospitality market. "We believe that tourism is growing and there's a lot of opportunity for tourism and hospitality in Gqeberha and therefore, it was time to reinvest in the property," he said.
The spending is part of a broader programme: two other Gqeberha properties, Road Lodge and Town Lodge, are also in the group's refurbishment pipeline, with work expected to continue during the 2027 financial year. City Lodge has also been investing in resilience infrastructure, including a second borehole and water-filtration system serving its Courtyard and Road Lodge properties, additional water tanks at its airport hotel, and generators and solar panels across its hotels.
The investment comes against a difficult economic backdrop. Unemployment in Nelson Mandela Bay climbed to 33.1% in the second quarter of 2026, from 29.8% in the previous quarter and 26.4% a year earlier, with about 183,000 people out of work and employment 49,000 lower than a year earlier, according to Statistics South Africa's Quarterly Labour Force Survey. In the Eastern Cape as a whole, unemployment rose to 47.5%, from 44.6% in the first quarter, leaving 1.219 million people unemployed and actively looking for work.
City Lodge Hotels general manager Andrea Anderson said the Eastern Cape continues to receive less attention from travellers than the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. "The Eastern Cape as a whole is actually the best-kept secret... Everybody flocks to KZN and the Western Cape, and this is still quite an unspoiled province. And if we can get it on the map, I think we're all going to be much better for it," she said, adding that there is also an urgent need to rehabilitate Gqeberha's central business district.
The group is separately trying to draw more local customers to its food and beverage operations. The refurbished Courtyard restaurant has been renamed 25° East, part of a strategy to give City Lodge restaurants distinct identities rather than treating them mainly as hotel amenities, according to Trevor Boyd, the group's operations general manager for food and beverage.